Porn Again Christians

San Diego  Buck Narrows is a musician with a cockeyed sense of calling. Armed with a guitar, a wah-wah pedal, and a brain a bit below his belt buckle, Narrows has set out to create a get-down soundtrack for the new millennium, or as he puts it, "bomb-ass songs for the future of porn."

Jason Hartley is a staff attorney at a San Diego law firm whose clients include Toyota and Carnival Cruise Lines. A trim and tidy 27-year-old with a closely cropped beard and short, thinning red hair, Hartley is also the drummer for Saviour Machine, a Christian band that headlined a number of U.S. religious rock festivals in the 1990s and even enjoyed some crossover success in Europe.

Hartley is not the sort of person you'd expect to find helping Narrows secure his X-rated legacy. Yet no one's working harder than Hartley to promote the Colton-born guitarist, who delivers a barrage of explicit and frankly un-Christian sentiments on his latest CD, beginning with the first song, "Girl with a Penis," where his emasculation anxiety peaks with the cry, "I hope she doesn't come on me."

Hartley is the founder of Dirty Dogma Records (www.dirtydogma.com), the young San Diego label -- Hartley says it's "still in its infantile stages" -- that markets Narrows. Narrows isn't the only artist on the fledgling label, which also features Richard Basement, a former member of the Shirleys, but he is definitely Dirty Dogma's most interesting act. His music blends elements of Isaac Hayes, Jane's Addiction, and the Beastie Boys in songs with titles like "Stoner in a Moshpit," "Black Sex," "Jizzum Man," and "Miss Jamison" (an ode, Hartley explains helpfully, to "the legendary porn star Jenna Jamison.")

The cover of Narrows's latest 12-song offering on Dirty Dogma, an album called The Wide Side of Narrows, features a curvaceous cartoon woman, clad in leopard-print bikini, nylons and six-inch pumps, clinging to a rocket that is hurtling through outer space. She's wearing one of those 1950s Buck Rogers fishbowl space helmets and an oxygen tank that resembles an old Hoover vacuum cleaner -- and she's grinning as if she's just spent the afternoon with Dirk Diggler.

The Wide Side of Narrows is one of those albums that you know is going to get somebody in trouble. That somebody should be Hartley, since he's the only person associated with the still-undistributed record who has a proper office job. (Narrows works in a car wash.) But the San Diego attorney doesn't seem worried about what his firm or its corporate clients will make of his after-work enthusiasm.

Besides, Hartley has already dreamed up a lawyerly defense. "Hey," he says, "I don't play on the record. I just produce it."

Hartley and Narrows, the budding record mogul and the raunchy performer, actually go way back. Like Hartley, Narrows -- known as Jeff Clayton in real life -- is a member of Saviour Machine. In fact, Narrows was one of the founding members of the scripture-quoting Christian group, which after ten years together plans to record just one more album and then disband.

Some members of the group want to move on to other projects. Hartley and Narrows want to move on to other lives. Call them Porn Again Christians: two guys with a wild sense of irony.

They just better hope that Jesus gets the joke.

"It's a cartoon of Bettie Page," Hartley says of the cover art on Narrows's latest CD when we meet. Hartley has just cut out of work at his downtown firm, where one of his specialties is defending cruise lines from the many slip-and-fall lawsuits filed each year by elderly passengers who never quite get their sea legs. ("Hey," Hartley says, "ships rock in the water.")

When I admit that I have no idea who Bettie Page was, Hartley gives me an expert-sounding idiot's guide to 1950s pin-up. Page, it turns out, was something of a cheesecake legend who had a long and productive collaborative relationship -- until she disappeared for 35 years beginning in 1957 -- with an equally famous photographer named Bunny Yeager, who, I admit to Hartley, I also didn't know.

There's a risk that critics -- both inside and outside the Christian community -- will detect more than a whiff of hypocrisy in all this. But Hartley says promoting Narrows is strictly business. Faith just does not figure into it.

"I am a Christian," Hartley says. "I believe in Jesus Christ ... But I don't think it needs to permeate every aspect of my life. It's just a personal thing for me.

"I came across a project from a friend of mine who's making really great music, and I found it entertaining. I think it's something that will sell, so I'll sell it. Some people find that hypocritical. [But] I'm not such a hard-core Christian conservative that I need to judge everybody. That's sort of the thing that turns me off the church."

"The guy who does this music is the most upstanding kind of guy," Hartley says. "He respects his wife. He has two little kids, a boy and a girl. It's just amazing that he turns this stuff out. It's just a testament to the adage that a lot of straight-looking, young white males are really perverts. I think the truth is every young guy has got some kind of perverted tendencies. If you're really honest with yourself."

Is that really an adage? Well, Hartley and Narrows think it is.

"I'm kind of a crude, disgusting person when I want to be, and I allow it to come out with Buck Narrows," Clayton says. "I'm a huge porn fan. I love porn, and Jenna Jamison makes great movies. I own every movie she's made. For ten years, my life was Saviour Machine. Now I want to have some fun."

(Narrows isn't all sexual swagger. One of the better cuts on Wide Side of Narrows is "White Boy," a song dedicated to the gang-banging vatos and their rucas that Clayton grew up with in the Inland Empire. And "215" commemorates the San Bernardino strip bar that Clayton frequented with his ex-wife. "The only way we could get turned on by each other is if we went to this club called 215 and watched naked women dance," he says.)